Nightshade | Characters & Character Analysis

Nightshade Characters

The three principal characters in Nightshade are John Shade, Mandrake, and Jennie Brady. Shade (whose name, more than one reviewer pointed out, is the same as that of the poet in Nabokov's Pale Fire, 1962) is the apparent protagonist, although it is possible there could be some argument of the matter from a technical point of view, since Mandrake outlives all the others and appears finally, on some level, to be the narrator of the whole story.

Shade is a former human, now and for most of the past three and a half centuries a virtually immortal "vampire" living on Mars. He was born in what would become the United States in the mid-eighteenth century and originally "died" at the hands of a band of renegades who also murdered his fellow settlers in order to sell their scalps to the British. In Shade's case, however, following his horrific...
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